Desperate Anti-Gunners Roll Out the D-Team in Run-Up to ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban SCOTUS Arguments

The United States Supreme Court is about to determine whether all Americans have a right to own a real AR regardless of their address thanks to two cases brought by the Second Amendment Foundation and its partners, which challenge “assault weapon” bans in Cook County, Illinois and Connecticut.

As you can imagine, the gun-banners and their paid activists are apoplectic with rage, hate and panic.

As a result, those who make their living by opposing the Second Amendment and other civil rights are pushing their media outlets hard, publishing false diatribes on a near-daily basis. They’re churning out trash and disinformation like there’s no tomorrow. And when the main anti-civil rights authors need a break, they turn to their B, C or even D teams.

One member of the civilian disarmament D-team published a story last week that’s about as amusing as it is untrue. Robert Spitzer, who describes himself as a professor emeritus of the Political Science Department at the State University of New York in Cortland, which was founded n 1868 as the “Courtland Normal School.”

This isn’t the first time the good perfesser has thrust both of his hands deep into the anti-gun money pot. Seven of his 14 books have been anti-gun and/or anti-Second Amendment works, including his most recent, The Gun Dilemma: How History is Against Expanded Gun Rights and Gun Law History: How Three-Hundred Years of Weapons Laws Built the Nation.

He has appeared frequently on the anti-gun media to denounce guns, gun owners and civil rights, including The Today Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightly News, PBS’s News Hour, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (LOL).

Spitzer’s recent article was hilariously titled: “Why the assault weapon debate is a culture debate”. It pretty much goes downhill from there.

I should point out that he posted his own story on the lefty Bluesky Social. So far, only one of his 111 followers has liked his work.

He begins (of course) by declaring himself an expert.

As a gun policy scholar, I believe this flurry of legal activity brings to a head the multi-decade dispute over restricting assault weapons that extends far beyond legal arguments. The source of the conflict ranges from elements of gun culture identity to the technical characteristics of these weapons. Much of this controversy remains misunderstood, including conflicting claims about the weapons’ origins and definition.

But what he asks the reader next makes further reading of his story extremely difficult.

Where the court ultimately stands will have to do with its answers to these tough questions. Is an assault weapon a weapon of war or a sporting rifle? Is it a machine gun or simply a tricked-out hunting rifle? Does it really pose a risk to the public compared to other guns? 

I didn’t need to open my safe and examine my ARs. None of them are weapons of war or full-auto, and none of them are “tricked-out hunting rifles.”

They’re ARs after all, and they don’t pose any risk to the public whatsoever.

Spitzer then characterizes the AR-15 rifle in a slanted as hilariously false a way as you’d expect.

• He claims AR sales are made as a “political statement.”
• He claims ARs are the weapon of choice for mass murderers.
• He claims AR rounds “travel farther and cause more harm.”
• He claims ARs are increasingly used by gangs and extremist political groups, rather than by millions and millions of law-abiding gun owners.

Spitzer ends screed with a nonsensical statement coupled with a surprise.

Despite this extensive regulatory past, experts generally expect that the court will strike down assault weapons restrictions. If so, it will be hard-pressed to justify the result as consistent with America’s extensive history of weapons regulation.

That hyperlink citing “America’s extensive history of weapons regulation” takes the reader to an advertisement for one of Spitzer’s own books. In other words, he’s citing himself as an authority.

That, friends, says about all you need to know about the good professor’s article. It’s full of falsehoods and, in the end, nothing more than another way for this “gun policy scholar” to peddle his own books.

 

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This story is part of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and is published here with their permission.